On
October 24, the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals granted a last-minute
stay of
execution for Troy Anthony Davis. He had been scheduled to be murdered
by the
state of Georgia three days later. Now the deadline has been pushed
back at
most to November 18 so his lawyers could file a habeas corpus appeal,
but it could come well before then. Davis, a 40-year-old black man, was
convicted
of the murder of a Savannah police officer in 1989. His conviction in a
1991
trial rested solely on the testimony of witnesses. No weapon was ever
found,
and there is no physical evidence linking Troy to the killing. Since
the trial,
seven of the nine eyewitnesses have recanted their testimony, several
saying
they were coerced by the police into fingering Davis. Three witnesses
have said
that another man admitted to killing the policeman.

That
wouoldn’t even get Troy Davis a hearing, much less set aside the guilty
verdict, under the 1996 Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act.
Signed
into law by Democratic PresidentBill
Clinton, AEDPA puts impossible limits on the admissibility of
exculpatory evidence.
Under this act, courts are instructed to ignore proof of innocence if
it wasn’t
presented in a “proper” and “timely” fashion. This is only part of an
elaborate
legal framework dating back to the time of slavery under which innocent
people
are routinely executed, particularly if they are poor and black. There
can be
no faith in the racist U.S. “justice” system.

The
liberal “human rights” group Amnesty In­ter­na­tional has
mount­ed an international
campaign calling for letters to be sent to the Georgia Board of
Pardons,
pointing to “overwhelming doubts of Davis’ guilt.” Over the years, a
host of
prominent figures have called to stop the execution of Troy Davis,
including
the Pope Benedict, former U.S. president and Georgia governor Jimmy
Carter,
Georgia Congressman John Lewis, South African bishop Desmond Tutu,
singer Harry
Belafonte and musician Ravi Shankar, as well as the Council of Europe
and the
European Parliament – all to no avail.

The threatened execution of Troy Davis is a
legal lynching. The
Inter­na­tionalist Group
calls on working people and the oppressed to mobilize to stop
the
execution, to free Troy Davisand abolish
the
barbaric death penalty!

The
statements by the witnesses who later recanted their trial testimony
expose the
everyday functioning of the capitalist state’s legal system.

Dorothy Ferrell was on
parole and staying in a hotel across the street from the scene of the
shooting.
Now she testifies: “I was scared that if I didn’t do what the police
wanted me
to do, then they would try to lock me up again.… From the way the
officer was
talking, he gave me the impression that I should say that Troy Davis
was the
one who shot the officer.... I told the detective that Troy Davis was
the
shooter, even though the truth was that I didn’t see who shot the
officer.… I
had four children at that time, and I was taking care of them myself. I
couldn’t go back to jail.”

Darrell Collins was only
16 when more than a dozen police officers converged on his home. “I
told them
that ... I didn’t see Troy do nothing. They got real mad when I said
this and
started getting in my face. They were telling me that I was an
accessory to
murder and that I would pay like Troy was gonna pay if I didn’t tell
them what
they wanted to hear. They told me … I would be lucky if I ever got out,
especially because a police officer got killed. … After a couple of
hours of
the detectives yelling at me and threatening me, I finally broke down
and told
them what they wanted to hear. … I am not proud for lying at Troy’s
trial, but
the police had me so messed up that I felt that’s all I could do or
else I
would go to jail.”

Antoine Williams was
coerced by police into signing a statement that he could not read,
implicating
a gunman who he did not see: “I couldn’t really tell what was going on
because
I had the darkest shades of tint you could possibly have on my windows
of my
car. As soon as I heard the shot and saw the officer go down, I ducked
down
under the dash of my car. ... Later that night, some cops … asked me to
describe the shooter and what he looked like. … I kept telling them
that I
didn’t know.… After the officers talked to me, they gave me a statement
and
told me to sign it. I signed it. I did not read it because I cannot
read.… I have
no idea what the person who shot the officer looks like.”

The
state of Georgia has refused to hear this evidence because it is
itching to
kill Troy Davis, and the courts have backed it up. On March 17, the
Georgia
Supreme Court denied Davis a new trial. His execution was scheduled for
September 23, and the state court and Parole Board refused to move the
date,
even when the U.S. Supreme Court scheduled a hearing for September 29.
But
eventually the high court in Washington refused to reconsider Davis’
case.

As
international protests gather in a last-ditch attempt to save him,
Davis’s
prosecutor, Spencer Lawton, has taken to the airwaves and the editorial
pages
to grease the skids for this legal lynching. He sneers at the
recantations of
the prosecution witnesses, who expose themselves to charges of perjury
by
coming forward, calling their sworn affidavits “coerced” (by whom?).
D.A.
Lawton’s defense of the state-sponsored lynching hanging over Troy
Davis’s head
drips with the bigoted rage of the professional frame-up artist. With
the sworn
recantations, the case against Davis stands on nothing but the naked
will of
the racist ruling class to “finish the job.”

Troy
Davis needs all the defenders he can get, but the bourgeois figures who
have
called to stay the execution are concerned first and foremost with
sanitizing
racist capitalist rule. Amnesty International petitions the Georgia
parole
board: “Your power to grant clemency exists to prevent such an
irreversible
error and preserve public faith in the state’s justice system.” Jimmy
Carter
ran for president in 1976 supporting the reintroduction of the death
penalty.
Even on the left, those who call for “justice for Troy Davis” and
looked to the
Supreme Court as Troy’s “last hope” build dangerous illusions in the
racist
justice system. The demand must be for freedom for Troy Davis,
for there
is no justice in the capitalist courts!

The
relentless drive for the assassination of Troy Davis is only the latest
case in
the machinery of state murder, where those accused of killing a police
officer
are framed and railroaded with a vengeance despite their innocence. On
October
6, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down an appeal of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the
renowned journalist and former Black Panther spokesman who has been on
Pennsylvania’s
death row for more than a quarter century, falsely accused of killing a
Philadelphia cop. The fact that witnesses lied on the stand in a rigged
trial
before a judge who was a lifetime member of the Fraternal Order of
Police was
of no concern to the high court. Now another appeal is being prepared
over the
blatant exclusion of black jurors in Mumia’s “trial.” Meanwhile, just
as the
execution of Davis was rescheduled, the Philly D.A.’s office called on
the U.S.
Supreme Court to reinstate the death sentence against Jamal.

While
supporting efforts to use whatever legal venues are open to him, we
call not
for a “new trial” in the bourgeois courts, as the liberals and
reformists
vainly do, but to mobilize the power of the working class in
action to free
Mumia Abu-Jamal. In Brazil our comrades of the Liga
Quarta-Internacionalista do Brasil have twice sparked work stoppages by
teachers in the state of Rio de Janeiro demanding Mumia’s freedom, the
latest
on May 7 of this year.

Troy
Davis is innocent, but Troy Davis is black and this is capitalist
America,
where black oppression is “enshrined” in the system of racist
repression. Over
40 percent of the people on this country’s death row are black. The
death
penalty is a direct legacy of slavery, and a symbol of how the
unfinished Civil
War left black people, North and South, branded and condemned as a
specially
oppressed color caste at the bottom rung of those whose toil enriches
the
exploiters.

The
one force more powerful than the determination of America’s “justice”
system to
kill an innocent black man is the international working class. In
Georgia,
Willie Seymore, president of Local 1414 of the International
Longshoremen’s
Association spoke to a meeting of more than 300 people at Savannah
State
University on October 13 protesting the scheduled execution of Troy
Davis. From
San Francisco, California, the president of International Longshore and
Warehouse Union Local 10, Melvin MacKay, sent a letter to the Georgia
Board of
Pardons, noting that “the death penalty, a leftover from the days of
slavery,
is used with a strong racial bias,” and calling to stop the execution
of Davis.

But
much more is needed: the power of the working class must be
brought to
bear. Yet the labor tops and civil rights groups leaders are mobilizing
their
members and resources to vote for Democrat Barack Obama, who defends
the
racist death penalty and tells those who protest against the racist
injustice
system that they must “respect” the verdict of the courts (as in the
case of
Sean Bell who was murdered in a hail of 50 bullets from New York City
cops who
were all acquitted).

Class struggle
against the legal lynchers is our last and best hope, and it is not too
late to
mobilize it. As the execution of Troy Davis looms, the Internationalist
Group
and League for the Fourth International urgently call on organized
labor to
mobilize working-class action across the country and internationally to
demand
freedom for Troy Davis and all class-war prisoners, and to smash the
racist
death penalty! ■

Down
with the Democrats and Republicans –
Capitalist Parties of War and Racist Repression